British officials sent to run the newly liberated Iraq in 2003 found themselves sidelined by American authorities, under-resourced and answering to impossible requests from Downing Street as the country descended into chaos, the most senior British diplomat in the Iraqi interim authority told the Iraq inquiry yesterday.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was the most senior British diplomat in Iraq in the first six months after the invasion, when he served as the deputy head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, said that despite committing an entire British Army division to the Iraq war, Britain had negligible influence on the course of events after the fighting ended.

“In British terms it was an enormous expedition,” he told the inquiry. “It was a well-executed job that the British did in the south east [around Basra] but in doing that job in the south east we added very little to what the coalition as a whole was doing in the rest of Iraq.”

British officials discovered that their views carried little weight.

“We were having to follow the Americans in almost everything that we did and we could not achieve the filling of gaps where we perceived gaps, unless the Americans did most of the heavy lifting in that respect,” he said. British influence was, he added, very limited because “we were a tenth or less of the practical capacity”.

Sir Jeremy, who was based in Baghdad from September 2003 until the following March, said that mission suffered “catastrophic success” when the Iraqi Army collapsed far more quickly than the negligible Western planning for its aftermath had anticipated.

There was also limited enthusiasm to help on the part of United Nations officials and Western governments at what they deemed a British and American-inspired problem.

“The feeling was that not only were the US and UK risking losing international sympathy and support for what they were doing in political terms through the use of force, but they were also causing everybody else, particularly the UN, a huge amount of trouble in what they were going to produce on the ground in physical terms with a destroyed country.”

As anarchy took hold, particularly after the UN evacuated its personnel, Sir Jeremy said that his American counterpart, Paul Bremer, refused to listen to calls to adapt to the changing circumstances and continued to feed Washington with upbeat reports of the situation.

“When I talked to other members of the American team, when I talked informally to the military, to the intelligence agencies, to other people who were operating, I found a very much more gloomy prognosis of what was going on than I felt or understood Bremer was reporting back to the Pentagon.”

Despite theoretically outranking Mr Bremer, Sir Jeremy told the inquiry that he received “direct and peremptory” instructions to stick to American planning from his US counterpart. He said realising that Mr Bremer “wasn’t going to easily accept political advice”, he would be forced to find alternative ways of influencing events.

Sir Jeremy went on: “The whole American effort was compartmentalised, stovepiped. The military and civilian arms were not working well together. There were differences between military and civilians. There were differences of view between the Pentagon and State Department. These were all being played out as we were trying to administer a country. There were also differences between London and Washington.”

Reporting to his own political masters, Sir Jeremy appeared to criticise Tony Blair’s grasp of the situation on the ground.

“Sir John [Sawers] and I tried to warn the Prime Minister that it would take quite a long time to get a decent police force of the necessary size going with decent training from scratch. But he said that was his priority and he wanted us to get on with that and see how quickly we could do it. We thought it might take a year or so to get a decent police force running. He said try and do it by the end of 2003 [in three months] if you possibly can.

“John and I looked at each other but decided we had better see whether we could do anything to help that. But we realised it was an extremely ambitious request.”

Sir Jeremy said in later testimony that six years after the invasion the Iraqi police remain a problem.

“The sense of hurry we had from our two capitals militated against the production of well-trained, well-behaved policemen on the ground. So there was a tension there,” he said.

The inquiry continues.

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